I spent four years as Forbes' Girl Friday, which to me meant doing a little bit of everything at once. As a member of the Forbes Entrepreneurs team, I looked at booming business and startup life with a female gaze. I worked on the PowerWomen Wealth and Celebrity 100 lists, keeping my ears pricked and pen poised for current event stories--from political sex scandals to celebrity gossip to international affairs. In 2012 I helped to put two South American women on the cover of FORBES Magazine: Modern Family star Sofia Vergara (the top-earning actress on U.S. television) and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who is transforming the BRIC nation into an entrepreneurial powerhouse. Prior to Forbes I was at the Philadelphia CityPaper, where I learned more than any girl ever needs to know about the city's seedier trades. I studied digital journalism at The University of The Arts.
I left Forbes in November, 2013, to pursue other interests on the West Coast.

But while the gifts given to Kim and soon-to-be ex-husband Kris Humphries were paid for out of her guests’ pockets, as the donation was made from Kardashian’s checkbook, the charitable deduction is hers alone come tax time.

“That deduction does not extend to the givers,” says Tax Girl Kelly Phillips Erb. “Because she’s accepted the gifts, even if they were cash, those gifts have become her property. So it’s her gift to charity, not that of her guests. A note from Kim is not the same as a receipt from a qualified charity.”

“I wanted to let you know that the money for every gift received by me at my wedding has been donated to the Dream Foundation,” she wrote in a letter obtained by TMZ that was reportedly sent to each of Kim’s personal wedding guests. A source close to the star told me this morning that Kardashian and Humphries split the guest-list, so the monetary value of gifts referenced in Kim’s letter was for gifts received from her guests and hers alone. An insider for Us says that Humphries only kept “the bibles” he received as gifts.

But for Kardashian, whose wedding guest list was over 400, returning each gift to its giver might have proved an insurmountable task. She could have simply donated the gifts to charity, but with a wedding registry that included items like a $635 Baccarat ice bucket with matching $260 ice tongs, a $375 candy jar, a $710 sugar bowl and a set of 20 napkin rings for $3,000 it might have been tricky. According to Erb, there are tax rules keeping people from donating items that can’t be used by the charity. How much use the Dream Foundation could have found for the Baccarat ice bucket is, of course, arguable, but might have been tricky to prove. And so she went the simpler (and much-more tax-advantageous route) of keeping the gifts and cutting a check to charity to off-set any lingering guilt.

“From a Miss Manners perspective, I think this is her way of trying to look good because she doesn’t want to give the gifts back,” says Erb. But from a tax perspective, she says, Kardashian is free and clear to take the deduction, no matter how unfair or even rude it might seem to her guests. Despite the fact that, in theory, it’s their cash that’s being donated, they have no claim to stake with the tax man.

Why? According to CPA and Forbes blogger Peter J. Reillyit’s because any connection between the wedding gifts and the charitable donation is only in Kardashian’s head. “Cash is fungible,” he says, “So I don’t think technically that there’s really any connection between the gifts and the cash donation.” Gifts are excluded from taxable income, and once Kardashian accepted them any value was absorbed by her own coffers. That she subsequently cut a check to a charity is, in the eyes of the tax code, an unrelated event.

“She’s making the donation to the Dream Foundation from her personal account,” he says, and whether that the donation is made in the name of others bears no regard. The deduction can only be claimed by the individual who receives acknowledgement from the charity, in this case, the same woman who signed the check. “The fact is that I make donations in people’s name all the time,” Reilly says, “In honor of my mother or my father…but that doesn’t mean anything, really. When I file my taxes, I still take the deduction.”

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